The Value Of Incremental Steps In Your Investment Portfolio

Investing is a stressful endeavor – plain and simple. You never have all the facts to make a perfect decision. You are only able to see the right answer with the benefit of hindsight. Things are always slow on the way up and frenetic on the way down. This all leads to emotions taking their toll on every single one of us.

One of the rules I have developed over the course of my investment career to cope with this stress is to always make changes in incremental steps. That means any buys or sells are accomplished through smaller adjustments rather than large sweeping changes. I prefer this method for several reasons:

You maintain a much greater correlation in your portfolio to the broad market or a specific benchmark with smaller steps.

You can still accomplish strategic shifts in asset allocation or direction without upsetting the entire apple cart.

Allowing a measure of time to pass between trades allows you to verify that your thesis is correct or adjust your strategy accordingly.

You reduce the anxiety that comes with large position sizes directed towards a specific outcome.

The use of transaction-free mutual funds or ETFs to aid this process makes for a very efficient transmission vehicle with the lowest possible costs. Almost all the major brokerage platforms have excellent curated lists of funds to use as diversified core positions without any expense to trade.

These tools can be used to scale in or out of the market based on prevailing conditions or simply just re-balanced on a dependable schedule to your preferred exposure targets. I have also found it to be an excellent way for investors who are all-cash to make their first forays into stocks and bonds. They can average into a suitable cost basis by using time and price to their advantage.

There are also some obvious downsides to this trading strategy as well. If you purchase a small quantity of something and it runs away from you, then you always wish you would have been a buyer in greater size. That’s one of the psychological demons that plague active investors. Nevertheless, you can be comforted with the knowledge that you were indeed correct and could at least partially participate in the opportunity. The same risk dynamics play out as the market is falling as well.